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TWO DEMANDS UPON LUCK EGALITARIANS
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2023
Abstract
I offer two objections to luck egalitarianism. The no-adequate-account objection takes note of the egalitarian insistence that the disvalue of inequality is only one of a plurality of values or disvalues that needs to be considered in arriving at a judgment about the ranking of alternative distributions of welfare. This turn to pluralism places a reasonable demand upon luck egalitarianism to provide an account of how the different sorts of values or disvalues that are supposed to attach to available distributions of welfare are to be aggregated or weighed against one another in that ranking procedure. I contend that the prospects for developing such an account are dim and that some salient responses to this objection misfire. The churlishness-envy objection against luck egalitarianism is that this doctrine countenances envy directed toward the faultless good fortune of others. This objection places a reasonable demand on luck egalitarians to formulate a version of their doctrine that does not underwrite envious responses toward those who gain through brute good luck. I contend that the most auspicious path toward satisfying the demand not to underwrite churlish envy advances a luck egalitarianism that asymmetrically affirms the badness of arbitrary disadvantage rather than the badness of both arbitrary disadvantage and arbitrary advantage. Since this is the strategy pursued in Shlomi Segall’s Why Inequality Matters, I offer critiques of Segall’s initial and revised versions of asymmetrical egalitarianism in support of my conclusion that luck egalitarianism seems unable to rebut or sidestep the churlishness-envy objection. I conclude that luck egalitarianism seems unable to satisfy either of the two reasonable demands upon it that I raise.
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- © 2023 Social Philosophy & Policy Foundation. Printed in the USA
Footnotes
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Department of Philosophy, Tulane University, ericmack123@hotmail.com. Competing Interests: The author declares none. I thank the other contributors to this volume, an anonymous referee, and Mary Sirridge for their helpful comments and criticisms on an earlier version of this essay.
References
1 For an important early article advancing relational egalitarianism and trenchantly attacking distributional luck egalitarianism, see Anderson, Elizabeth, “What Is the Point of Equality?” Ethics 109, no. 2 (1999): 287–337 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the present volume, relational egalitarianism is represented in quite different ways by Clare Chambers and Tom Christiano.
2 One might instead hold that the equal importance of each individual’s welfare supports the view that each individual has reason to advance his or her own welfare or that it supports the view that each individual has reason to advance everyone’s welfare. Neither of these views would substantively be egalitarian.
3 I bypass the dispute among luck egalitarians about what exactly should be equalized. For instance, should it be welfare or resources for the pursuit of welfare? See Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?” 293–95.
4 Luck egalitarianism “focuses not on the misery of a person’s condition but on the gap between least and most fortunate.” Anderson, “What Is the Point of Equality?” 307.
5 See, e.g., the extensive bibliography in Segall, Shlomi, Why Inequality Matters: Luck Egalitarianism, Its Meaning and Value (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6 See Section III below.
7 For examples, see Section II.
8 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 74.
9 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 50–51.
10 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 24.
11 Temkin, Larry, “Illuminating Egalitarianism,” in Contemporary Debates in Political Philosophy, ed. Christiano, Thomas and Christman, John (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 160 Google Scholar. See Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 141–42, for his affirmation of a pluralism of “impersonal” values.
12 See, e.g., Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 3–5, 23–30, 32–47.
13 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 237–38.
14 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 238 (emphasis added).
15 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 238 (emphasis added).
16 Such an account should also speak to the question of whether the badness of Smith losing half of her sight in one eye is more than made up for by cutting in half the inequality of sight between Jones and Smith.
17 See Cohen, G. A., Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 244 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
18 See the last paragraph of Section III for such a shift.
19 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 72n47; Tungodden, Bertil, “The Value of Equality,” Economics & Philosophy 19, no. 1 (April 2003): 9Google Scholar.
20 Note that, in terms of the payoffs in the present table, any torture must be mild enough to leave its subject at welfare level 8.
21 But see the opening paragraphs of Section III.
22 I thank Joseph Heath for this possible response, which echoes John Rawls’s reliance on “reflective equilibrium”; see, e.g., Rawls, John, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 48–51 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
23 I thank an anonymous referee for this objection and for mentioning Isaiah Berlin as an example of such a pluralist.
24 I am not myself saying that these are the values that should guide individual choice.
25 For a discussion of this sort of move from pluralism to liberalism in Isaiah Berlin, see Mack, Eric, “Isaiah Berlin and the Quest for Liberal Pluralism,” Public Affairs Quarterly 7, no. 3 (1993): 215–30Google Scholar.
26 I thank an anonymous referee for suggesting the bullet-biting move.
27 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 51 (emphasis added). Note that in this passage Segall already focuses asymmetrically on the arbitrarily disadvantaged.
28 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 50 (emphasis added).
29 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 50.
30 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 50.
31 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 49–50. A bit later, Segall refers to his explanation of the intrinsic badness of arbitrary inequalities as the “arbitrary disadvantage account” and he also holds that “[t]elic egalitarianism [is] grounded in the badness of arbitrary disadvantage.” Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 53, 54.
32 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 63–64.
33 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 66.
34 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 68–69. However, Segall should not have added the symmetrical conclusion that “arbitrary inequalities are always bad” (emphasis added).
35 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 67.
36 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 74.
37 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 74.
38 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 53.
39 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 1.
40 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 71.
41 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 78–83. I believe that this more clearly states a motivation for the revised doctrine than one can find in Segall’s text.
42 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 80n19.
43 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 80.
44 As printed, Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 83, has the word “equality,” not the word “inequality.” Segall confirms that this is a typo; it was supposed to be “inequality.” Shlomi Segall, email message to author, December 6, 2020.
45 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 83.
46 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 81n20.
47 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 89. Sometimes, Segal seems to be thinking that, according to the revised view, badness attaches to an individual’s disadvantage only when her interpersonal disadvantage explains her intrapersonal disadvantage: “[I]nequality has no value [I presume Segall means disvalue] when it does not impugn on individuals’ welfare.” Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 96.
48 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 80–81.
49 If Smith’s good luck consisted of 5 additional units of welfare that were on their way to Jones but then got diverted to Smith, we would have a case of Jones being intrapersonally disadvantaged.
50 See Segall’s own critique of what he calls “Conditional Egalitarianism.” Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 28–31.
51 Perhaps, if one holds that the badness of one party’s intrapersonal loss supports belief in the non-person-affecting badness of the resulting interpersonal inequality, one should also hold that the goodness of one party’s intrapersonal gain supports belief in the non-person-affecting goodness of the resulting interpersonal inequality.
52 I put aside gimmicky cases such as an advantage transition in which the gain to one sadistic party arises from his mistaken belief that the other party is profoundly miserable.
53 I set aside the worsening of people who are downcast by the welfare gains of others.
54 The possibility of which is noted by an anonymous referee.
55 Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 82.
56 Recall my discussion in Section I of the conflation of an individual being comparatively worse off and that individual being non-comparatively worse off.
57 Another salient feature of Segall’s asymmetrical luck egalitarianism is the claim that “[t]he badness of inequality … must reside with, or be owned by the worse-off party. That is, the badness of inequality, non-person-affecting as it might be, has something to do with her [the worse-off party] and her position, certainly more than with the better off party.” Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 63–64. Segall ties this claim about the non-person-affecting badness residing in or being owned by the worse-off party to the view that it is the worse-off party who has a valid complaint about that badness rather than both of the parties having that complaint. Indeed, “the badness of inequality [is] grounded in an individual complaint, one possessed disproportionally by the worse off.” Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 113. As I have noted in Section IV above, if the complaint that grounds the badness of inequality is against the comparatively better-off individual, we are back to an egalitarianism that does countenance envy. An alternative is that the complaint is against God or the universe: “[T]ry and imagine yourself to be some sort of creator of [an arbitrarily unequal] universe, upon whom supplications are made. The poor Incas (and the worse-off aliens) have a good claim that they may press on you.” Segall, Why Inequality Matters, 51.